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Comment by jsmith0295 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience this problem could be alleviated if it were possible for a worker to work a 50-60 hour week at a single job without incurring additional expenses for their employer. The current regulations around that sort of thing make it so the people who want to avoid needing government assistance have to get two jobs and deal with potential scheduling conflicts between them. When I worked minimum wage jobs there were a lot of people who couldn't work out a situation where they could easily get a second job like this partly because they were dependent on slow public transportation. You'd likely have significantly less people on government assistance if they were free to work more

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You Americans are so brutal to each other. Instead of trying to address the problem of why someone can't live on a 40-hour week, you just want to remove one of the staple worker-protection laws.

60-hour weeks basically means you live to work. Have you considered that perhaps someone's economic usefulness shouldn't be the only determinate of whether they have to spend essentially their entire lives on Earth just trying to survive?

> You Americans are so brutal to each other.

Brutal is an exaggeration. Americans don't come close to leading in the 50+ hour work week category. The US now ranks below: Iceland, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea on that metric and has been falling down those rankings for decades.

https://utopiayouarestandinginit.com/2016/08/15/employees-wo...

When I say brutal, I'm not specifically talking about people working 50+ hours a week, I'm talking about the mindset that says that the singular number of how many bucks you can pull in should determine whether or not you're going to have a seriously downtrodden life, as if that were the only measure of your value to the world, or as a human being.

How should you measure your value to the world if not by what you produce? By being very very good looking and your mother thinks you're smart? By being a nice person? Being nice should be table stakes, but ultimately, on average, people need to produce more than they consume or the world as we know it fails. It wasn't too long ago, that 50+ hours/week was a luxury - and it wasn't earned by typing at a desk.

>By being very very good looking

Models are paid to be very, very good-looking. "What you produce" is a value decision in the first place, one that society makes together by how we allocate resources.

Yes. We basically pay people based on 1 metric.

Not what they produce, but how good they are at convincing other people to give them money. Whether it's by building a product, being very good-looking, or asking for a handout. (Sure you can say that we pay people based on what they produce if you argue that a homeless man is producing good feelings when you donate to him, but I think that's a bit silly).

Obviously this is always going to be the case to some extent in a free society, but we should definitely do more to help those who don't happen to be good at convincing other people to part with their cash.

Many contributions that people make to a functioning society can't, and never will be, quantified.

One way around this is to assign a base value to a person because they are a member of the human race and a citizen of your country, and then let them demonstrate additional value through the usual capitalist means.

It's imperfect, certainly, but it works well enough in many developed countries, and it's more accurate than the model that says what can't be measured has no value.

And how does that brutality compare to the 96% (or more) of the rest of the world that falls below the US median standard of living? You're trying to pretend those systems aren't extraordinarily brutal to their people? It's absurd.

I see no evidence to support your premise that the US is brutal toward its people, given the high wages the US pays, the high standard of living the US offers at the median, and the extraordinarily high disposable income levels the US offers at the median ($44,000 household disposable income vs eg $28,000 in Finland). Where's the brutality? The sole thing I can see that is actually bad is in healthcare.

Let's compare the US median to the medians in: Spain, Portugal, Greece, France, UK, Germany, Italy, Czech, Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Belarus, Turkey, New Zealand, China, South Korea, Russia, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, South Africa, Nigeria, Iran, Egypt, Indonesia.

The only thing you're going to find where the US lags significantly, is in regards to healthcare costs. In nearly every other economic respect, the US exceeds those nations and the radical majority of the planet.

Why would you compare the US to developing countries. If you want to compare us to other countries, compare us to developed countries.

Yes our median and mean incomes, disable incomes, household wealth etc... are high.

But those values aren't very evenly distributed at all. Just look at average household wealth by race. You'll find an enormous discrepancy. (I was actually shocked when I looked at this. I knew it was bad, but not that bad)

We have a huge number of people doing incredibly well, and a huge number of people barely getting by. The social programs other developed countries offer go a long way towards easing the burdens of that 2nd group.

You can point to Finland and say that yes they have $16k less in disposable income, but they have universal health care (which you already pointed out), they have paid family leave, they have worker protections, better unemployment etc...

New Zealand & Australia having a higher percentage of people working 50+ hour weeks over the US seems unintuitive.

Update - Getting downvoted, so here's explanation:

This doesn't align with the culture over there at all. I think this source is questionable.

For example, if you compare the average hours worked per worker over a year (descending), the U.S. is #18 with 1,789 hours while Australia is much lower at #27 with 1,664 hours [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time

Part of the problem is that employers like Walmart aren't hiring people full-time at 40 hours a week because that requires the worker get benefits. So they hire mostly part-time work at 30-hours a week or less, which isn't enough for people to live, so the workers have to try and get a second job.

There are a few solutions to this. You could completely separate health insurance from employment. Or you could require benefits for part-time employees as well.

I never got why health insurance is tied to employment. Then when you switch jobs, you start a new plan and then there could be a gap where you could be uninsured. I think health insurance should be separated from employment. I think we're the only country that does it this way.

This. So much this.

You can also do things like require the same sort of benefits for all employees. Pro-rated vacation and sick time, if offered, as well as retirement, discounts, and other such things.

> You Americans are so brutal to each other.

So first off that's kind of offensive. Secondly, one commentor on HN doesn't reflect the views of 300M+ people.

People typically come to HN because it fosters good discussion. Throwing insults at an entire country doesn't accomplish that at all.

I'm American, and I'm more offended by the way we treat workers than I am by someone calling us out on it.

It's not an insult. It might not reflect the views of the entire country, but it is an accurate depiction of our labor policies.

We are the only developed nation in the world without paid maternity/paternity leave. No universal healthcare. No protection from arbitrary termination. And a terribly low minimum wage that hasn't kept up with inflation.

We? My state has a decent minimum wage, my company offers good benefits, including cheap healthcare and paid maternity/paternity leave.

Some people might not care about their fellow workers but some of us do. Typecasting all Americans as brutal is offensive. I say this as someone who actively helped to campaign for a higher minimum wage. But yeah, I'm American so I must not care about anyone else. I'm fucking sick of this stereotype.

> my company offers good benefits, including cheap healthcare and paid maternity/paternity leave

How does that help people who aren't working for your company. That's like saying America isn't brutal to it's workers because rich people can afford good dental plans. Sure we're not brutal to people who have good well-paying jobs. We're brutal to people who aren't that fortunate.

> But yeah, I'm American so I must not care about anyone else. I'm fucking sick of this stereotype.

Work to change it. Our country sucks when it comes to labor rights and social welfare compared to every other developed country.

As long as that's true it's not really unfair to call us brutal to workers.

Obviously there are those of us who aren't, but it's a pretty fair generalization for the country as a whole.

A bit of an aside, but there is no such thing as a "good dental plan" when you talk about affording one in the US. Every single dental plan I've seen has a fairly low cap on the annual amount it will pay out; for many that cap is below the annual premium.

Dental plans as practiced in the US only make sense if someone other than the beneficiary is paying the premiums. So what really matters isn't whether someone is rich but whether their employer is paying for a dental plan.

Now "rich people" can afford to just pay the dentist, of course. Not least because dentists typically have sane price transparency (e.g. will tell you ahead of time how much something will cost) and dental emergencies are very rare, so people can usefully shop around. As a result dentists are actually subject to price competition, unlike most of the other parts of the medical profession.

That's very true. I did manage to find a dental insurance plan that has a $3500 max payout to any dentist (no network limitations, covers 80% of most stuff 50% of major things like crowns/surgery etc..) and costs less than $700 per year in premiums.

It's worth it to me because I'm self employed, so I can deduct dental insurance premiums, but I make too much to deduct direct dental costs (they're too small a percent of my income).

Since my marginal tax rate is close to 50% it only costs me about $350 a year, which is a bit less than it saves me on average each year when I've needed normal stuff like 2 cleanings, x-rays, a filling or 2. And my cost after tax deduction is a lot less than it would save me if I did need some major work.

> > You Americans are so brutal to each other.

> So first off that's kind of offensive.

Perhaps, but it's also true, at least when restricted to relative comparisons within the field of employment.

It's certainly not universally true. Not for employers and not for citizens. There are people in the US that care about those things and it's lazy to neglect that and instead just state that all Americans don't care.

There is almost never a time when someone says group X thinks Y that they mean literally every person in group X thinks Y.

If I say the Japanese love seafood that doesn't mean I think there are no Japanese people who hate seafood.

We're speaking in a natural language not Lojban.

> Have you considered that perhaps someone's economic usefulness shouldn't be the only determinate of whether they have to spend essentially their entire lives on Earth just trying to survive?

Yes. We have. A great many of us have considered this at significant length over the course of centuries. The question is not novel by any reasonable measure.

Do you have a suggestion along the lines of an answer, or did you wish to merely pose the question?

The answer has long since been established to be, "No, a person's personhood is morally primary and overrides their economic usefulness or uselessness."

Indeed!

However, history suggests that translating that laudable sentiment into actual resource-allocating policy and social organization is upon occasion slightly less than maximally clear, obvious, or straightforward.

>"60-hour weeks basically means you live to work. Have you considered that perhaps someone's economic usefulness shouldn't be the only determinate of whether they have to spend essentially their entire lives on Earth just trying to survive?"

Have you considered that perhaps it's someone's prerogative and right to choose whether or not they want to pay for other people's lack of "economic usefulness"?

We're in this mess precisely because we had good intentions of helping the needy, and propping them up. All that did was raise their number, putting all sorts of economic pressures on existing poor people's salaries. Now we're expected to foot the bill even more?

You know, at some point, people are going to start saying enough to that sort of thing. It's borderline emotional-terrorism to guilt people into supporting so many needy. NO I am not a bad person for wanting the best for the people I care about. And not wanting to sacrifice it for the people who are reckless about bringing innocents into this world on my expense, and then teaching them anyways to hate me for not wanting to sacrifice further.

One last thing. I come from a family where the sole bread-winner did work 60-hour work weeks, and still does. Precisely so that I and my sibling wouldn't have to. Though I still do, because I want even better for the people I care about and brought into this world.

This is especially a problem because any solutions that are politically likely at this point, like raising the minimum wage, aren't taking money from the wealthiest, they're taking money from the middle class to fund wealth redistribution.

The taxation system is a man-made thing. If Americans wanted to raise the minimum wage, but redistribute the costs of it to the upper and not middle class, that is absolutely possible.

It's possible but there's basically no chance of that occurring in the current political climate. Our "liberal" party is dominated by corporate interests. Hillary Clinton being the Democratic nominee is basically the perfect example of that. It probably isn't clear based on my other posts, but I'd love to have some of the policies Bernie Sanders has proposed rather than what I've talked about here. At this point it just seems a bit like a fantasy. Especially given how gerrymandering has the Republicans in a position to keep ahold of the House for quite awhile.

Your last paragraph is kind of to my point: in many other developed countries, your bread-winner _wouldn't have had to_ make such a huge sacrifice, just to make sure their dependants don't get stuck in poverty.

There's countries in the world where the bottom rung isn't such a terrible place, and people don't have to constantly sacrifice just to make sure they don't end up there. And those countries are doing just fine - there's no horde unemployed destroying their economies. There is, however, less stress, less fear, and a better standard of living for the median person. And sure, there's no country that's perfect, but what I'm saying is there's at least one alternative, which is currently working well in real economies, to the "red in tooth and claw" fight that Americans feel is necessary.

I'm not making a guilt-trip argument here. If you're a working class person in America, by a wide range of objective measures (access to health care and education, life expectancy, time with family, class mobility, exposure to crime, etc.) you're worse off than if you were in the working class in many other countries, ones with higher taxes and more generous welfare systems. Sure, if you look at just your taxes going out, it looks worse, but the situation overall for everyone in the 99% is improved. You just have to get over your distaste for your taxes helping poor (and sometimes lazy) people, because despite that it still ends up helping you.

>You Americans are so brutal to each other. Instead of trying to address the problem of why someone can't live on a 40-hour week, you just want to remove one of the staple worker-protection laws.

I take it you're European? What's the youth unemployment rate in your country?

Canadian, and it's similar to America's.

This kind of runs against the philosophical ideal of the limited workweek though. The idea is that people should never have to work more than 40 hours to make ends meet, and so when working 40 hours is not enough, the government will close the gap.

Sure, we could probably reduce welfare dependence by allowing people to work 60h a week, but that would be abandoning one of the most important principles of the fair labor standards act and greatest achievements of the labor movement.

You can survive on 40h a week, but that's about it. I don't think it's worth limiting people who want to do better than that just to try and get people to work less on average. So I guess their achievement just doesn't go far enough in my mind because it hinders economic mobility. If it were possible to succeed on 40h a week of minimum wage, then it might be different. I don't think that's really possible to achieve universally though federal policy, though. I'd prefer to just get rid of the overtime pay requirement and health care requirements included in the ACA (or probably most of the ACA. The mandate and tax is really terrible for young working people.)

Edit: Just to clarify a bit, when I was working 2 minimum wage jobs it was because I wanted to be able to build some savings. I could have actually lived more comfortably (and had health insurance) had I opted to only work one job and apply for benefits, but then I just would have been getting by. Had I not had the extra money saved up I wouldn't have been able to replace my car when it's transmission went out, or be able to take the risk to work at a startup which is how I started my career as a software engineer.

If a full time job at minimum wage with benefits isn't enough to get out of poverty, then changing the definition of 'full time' seems like an odd solution. Raising minimum wage or benefits seems much more reasonable alternatives.

Raising minimum wage also reduces the number of jobs available fir the most needy.

https://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum-wage/mythbuster

That's a myth.

But that raising the work-time per worker reduces the number of jobs available is not a myth, it's mathematical inevitability (unless work-hours needed not only will grow to compensate, but also grow more than if the per worker work-time had remained fixed).

Incorrect - raising the price of labor does not decrease the demand for labor. It's a movement along the demand curve, not a shift. Ultimately, what will influence the amount of jobs available at Walmart will be the demand for Walmart's products, macro economic trends, technological innovation, etc. They're obviously not doing this out of a goodness of their heart - their doing it because their stores are a mess and sales have been slumping. By increasing worker's wages, their betting that the increase in productivity will spur demand for Walmart's products.

> Incorrect - raising the price of labor does not decrease the demand for labor. It's a movement along the demand curve, not a shift.

But wouldn't this movement along the demand curve reduce the number of jobs available (at the point where demand and supply cross)?

Remarkable that simple application of the yet-to-be-disproven (or even seriously contested) theory of supply and demand to the price of labor is downvoted where you'd expect to find rational people.

https://fee.org/articles/raising-the-minimum-wage-wont-allev...

That's what my second point was alluding to - I should have been more clear:

Since the premise is that the demand for Wal-Mart's products has fallen due to worker unproductivity, their bet is that there will be a new demand curve altogether by increasing their productivity, one that is shifted to the "right" of the original one. The price of labor is counteracted by the new demand for it.

nine_k's remark was about the general effect of raising the minimum wage. You seem to be talking about Walmart deciding to pay more to their workers, a completely different issue.

The most needy who barely survive on minimum wage? That's not compassion for the most needy, it's exploitation of the most needy and government safety nets.

Obviously some jobs might become unviable if you raise the minimum wage. However unless society fails catastrophically there will always be demand to fulfil everyone's basic needs, which should supply enough jobs to fulfil those needs.

>You can survive on 40h a week, but that's about it.

We could thrive on 20h a week.

We just don't have a rational allotment of resources, but rely on busy-work, antiquated (pre software and pre-automation) work ethics and timelines, and squeeze them extra too so that enterprises and employers can get that extra profit margin out of employees.

I've heard this before about busy work (aka "bullshit jobs") but I'm not sure why we have them. Isn't it in the company's best interest to not have them?

Do managers generally have any incentive to recommend laying off subordinates when they're no longer required? They certainly have incentive to keep them around doing bullshit work -- the higher your headcount the more prestige you have as a manager.

> Isn't it in the company's best interest to not have them?

Usually, yes. But the company might not necessarily only make decisions in their own best interest.

Sometimes, executives/owners just like to see lots of people head-down "hard at work". Sometimes, execs/owners adamantly believe work has to be done, that doesn't actually need to be done. Sometimes, the customer demands busy work be done and pays the company for it. (every Enterprise or Government contract I've ever seen has some amount of this) Sometimes, people just can't agree on what work is busy work in the first place.

I'm sure there are more reasons. Those four come to mind because I have personally experienced all of them at some point in the last decade.

If workers move from 40 hours a week to 60 hours a week, that's going to result in up to a 50% reduction in available jobs. Realistically the number will be lower, as not everyone is going to want to work that much. But that's still going to have a huge negative effect on unemployment.

With the slow but steady rise of automation, the solution is not more work per employee, but less. There's going to be an incredibly rough period as unrestrained capitalism struggles against ideas like basic income. But there will come a day when there isn't enough work to go around, and your idea will only make this situation worse.

We have the wealth to pay workers more, at least in the US. It's just that the top ~400 people have more of it than the bottom 160,000,000 people combined. This doesn't require absolute socialism where everyone is given exactly the same amount regardless of work ethic; any amount of reduction in income inequality would be beneficial. A return to where we were in the 1950s (ignoring other inequality issues of the time) would be a very positive step.

Further, exponential growth of revenue is impossible to sustain indefinitely. At some point, people are going to have to stop judging a company that breaks even or has stable profits as a failure. As long as a company isn't losing money, it's providing value to all the people it employs, and to the economy as a whole by allowing those workers to purchase goods and services from others.

> At some point, people are going to have to stop judging a company that breaks even or has stable profits as a failure.

These are called utility companies or dividend companies and no one judges them a failure, outside of the SV bubble.

That isn't necessarily true. I wouldn't expect a wholesale move to 60 hour work weeks if the overtime pay requirement were raised or eliminated. And there are many people who already want to work 60 or more hours a week who get a second job to do that, but it's a very annoying and inconvenient process, and it usually results in a decent amount of wasted energy on the part of the worker. Having two jobs is especially inconvient when it takes 40+ minutes to commute via public transportation.

Though I also agree that there should be more wealth redistribution. But without a very significant increase in that sort of thing, the existing laws are still going to be more in the way of workers than actually helping them in my opinion.

> I wouldn't expect a wholesale move to 60 hour work weeks if the overtime pay requirement were raised or eliminated.

Certainly not. But for every two people that do, that's one more 40-hour-a-week job eliminated from the market. Unemployment is already at, depending on who you ask, 5% to 10%. Do we want to make that worse?

Further, people's natural productivity drops off after a certain point due to exhaustion. Why would an employer even want to pay the same employee to work to the bone when they can pay two employees the same amount and have them at their best?

> And there are many people who already want to work 60 or more hours a week who get a second job to do that, but it's a very annoying and inconvenient process

This isn't meant as a negative response to you, I just thought I'd share my experiences with you, if you're interested.

When I first started out on my own at 18, I was in the position where I had to. To qualify for an apartment, you had to make 3x the income level of your rent. The cheapest apartment was this affair where you paid for a room and shared living space with three others (they handled the roommates for you, so you weren't screwed if one up and left), for $425 a month (this was in 2001.)

Net income from 40 hours a week at Wal-Mart was just shy of $800 a month. So that required me working an extra 25-30 hours a week at McDonalds. It wasn't too bad because I spoke with both managers and worked things out before accepting the second job. But I agree, this can usually be really hard in these kinds of jobs that want to change your schedule every week.

Now to say that people "want" to do this ... holy fuck no. I literally started getting gray streaks in my hair after a few weeks of doing that. At 18 years old. I had no energy or time to do anything else. I basically lived to work.

I get that people do this, and some even work -more- hours, and do even -harder- work (like farm labor.) But, you know, fuck that. With my body decayed as much as it has since then, it would be impossible for me to do that again. And honestly, no hyperbole at all, I'd rather be dead than live like that again.

I always find it so laughably obscene that just because I am good at computer programming, I now earn six times more per hour (even accounting for inflation), and work 40% less hours per week. I never feel right that I make so much more simply because I'm good at something that others aren't. The lazy ones who don't try, sure. But the ones who just don't have the intellect for higher skilled labor ... that's heartbreaking that they're stuck in these kinds of positions.

And since I've shared their experience, it's a lot harder for me to turn a blind eye and tell them to just work more.

---

Now all that said, maybe you've worked longer and harder than I have, and find me to be a huge wuss. And there's probably some truth in that. I'm definitely only speaking for myself here.

People have been talking about automation for generations. Replace "robot" with "combine" or "steam engine" or "cotton gin" and you get the exact same talk.

In part the answer is that people actually do work less than they used to. Less child labor, longer retirement--even the idea of retirement is something new.

Seems like that paid family leave so many want would be a good way to lessen work.

Society has found ways to cope with efficiency before, and the result has always been that people wind up with a higher standard of living. There's no reason it will be different now.

> People have been talking about automation for generations.

Sure. But there's some truly devastating automations coming up unlike any before it.

Self-driving vehicles are going to kill four million decent paying jobs driving semis. Where are these jobs going to go? Manufacturing is all but gone here. Outsourcing is taking out another huge swath of skilled workers. We're not going to be able to run an entire economy on the service industry.

And even those jobs aren't safe. Grocery stores are steadily replacing cashiers with self-checkouts. Fast food is increasingly being automated -- Eatsa has one employee working per store. People are staying home and ordering online where warehouse jobs at eg Amazon are increasingly assisted by automation.

Yes, if we look at the past, there's a lot of unnecessary jobs we've eliminated. Pin setters for bowling alleys, street lamp lighters, phone switch operators, etc. Then we have the really good paying jobs we've cut through outsourcing manufacturing and programming jobs. And yes, every time we've had some new job for people to go to. And they've always been worse jobs with lower pay.

We've gone from a time where one person working could afford a house and two cars, and get a pension retirement at 65; to now where both spouses need to work, probably can't afford a house, and will need their kids to get by on student loans to go to college. 401Ks do not replace pensions, and they can disappear out from under you (eg MCI Worldcom.)

But this time is different: we're really on the bottom rung of jobs in the service industry. Replace these jobs, and there's nowhere else to go.

Society is going to be forced to deal with a post-work economy. I don't mean no one working, but I do mean "there aren't enough jobs for everyone to work 40, let alone 60, hours a week." Broken window fallacy and all.

I think the pace of automation is slow right now, as we still aren't very good with AI. But eventually there's going to be a breakthrough in AI, and I don't see our governments keeping up with how rapidly everything is going to change.

Maybe this future is 10 years away. Maybe it's 100 years away. But it is coming.

How is 50-60 relevant? Shift employees at many companies beg for ~40 hours but can't get them. Walmart gives employees ~30hr weeks, to avoid providing health insurance. It's not about the overhead of juggling extra shifts, it's about circumventing labor laws to pay lowest possible hourly wages.

That's part of the problem I was referring to. If reducing hours didn't cut the cost of labor then employers wouldn't have an incentive to do it, and people wouldn't need second jobs. That 30 hour thing is fairly recent, and some companies get around it by simply having really shitty insurance that nobody is going to opt into. McDonalds does this. I don't know if that's the approach Walmart takes, but I was able to get around 40 hours a week there while I did work there. That may differ based upon the job you do though -- I was unloading trucks mainly.

>In my experience this problem could be alleviated if it were possible for a worker to work a 50-60 hour week at a single job without incurring additional expenses for their employe

Yeah. Also slavery might work.

People are already working those kind of hours, sometimes more. It's just difficult and they end up having to do stupid shit like have an hour and a half between shifts that isn't really good for anything. Most people who work two jobs would rather work 10-12 hour shifts instead of shorter shifts at two different jobs, often 6-7 days a week instead of 5.

>Most people who work two jobs would rather work 10-12 hour shifts instead of shorter shifts at two different jobs, often 6-7 days a week instead of 5.

Maybe we shouldn't optimize for the lesser evil but fix the issue altogether?

>In my experience this problem could be alleviated if it were possible for a worker to work a 50-60 hour week at a single job without incurring additional expenses for their employer.

How would working more without any more wages actually help the worker? Or do you mean the worker would receive their normal hourly wage without the "additional expense" of time-and-a-half overtime rates?

This scheme sounds insane, a recipe for slave-driving and exploitation of the worst kinds.

The problem is that people are already getting second jobs for this very reason. People want to work more when they're only making around minimum wage, and the laws that are supposed to protect them just make that difficult.

I was saying they ought to get the same hourly rate but that the time and a half pay should not be mandated as a federal law as it is now.

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